"Salesforce.com offers a small sliver of what SAP can do, and customers recognize this," said Vishal Sikka, SAP executive board member, technology and innovation, in a statement.

"A true social enterprise strategy is about empowering people to work, think and interact in new ways, tackle business challenges in new ways, and connect more directly with each other and with the data that matters," he said. "This is only truly possible with deep integration of front-end applications that empower the user with core back-end business processes and data. Only SAP brings this expertise, and it is in every aspect of our product portfolio."

Salesforce.com and its outspoken CEO, Marc Benioff, have been pushing the "social enterprise" vision for some time. Companies can achieve this through a three-step process, in a speech earlier this year. The first move is to connect with public social sites such as LinkedIn, followed by the creation of a private social network. Lastly, enterprise applications should get a social-networking injection, he said.

Salesforce.com's primary social tool is Chatter, which offers real-time collaboration capabilities. It has also acquired companies such as Radian6, which has technologies customers can use to monitor the social Web.

SAP has no full-fledged social networking software of its own, but has developed the StreamWork collaboration application. It also has a partnership with enterprise social-networking vendor Jive Software, and along with Microsoft created Duet, which links SAP applications to SharePoint.